Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Home Improvement

David and I have been working on several home improvement projects lately. We have found that working on the house can be tough when both of us have other responsibilities during the day. But during the process we have learned a lot and now possess a large collection of tools. One of the most frustrating aspects of home improvement is the many unexpected trips (and expenses) one makes going to Home Depot or Lowe's to get something for the project you intended to start that evening. Or even more frustrating is finding tools that would have made the job a lot easier if you had known about it before!

However with my family coming at the end of the week we have been working overtime trying to finish some of the projects that we have started.

For this post we will concentrate on the progress of the floor.

We began with ceramic tile that can not be described by color, yellow vinyl flooring and pink carpet. The strangest thing to us about the flooring in the house was that there was carpet in both the dining area and vanity area.

Demolition is both the easiest and hardest part of the entire process. In the beginning you get a dramatic change in a short amount of time. But once all the large pieces are gone it takes FOREVER to clean and prepare the area for the next step.

p.s. below you can see the pink carpet...who does that?

Done with the easy part...At this point we had to scrape all the previous thinset off the concrete subfloor. At this point we did not our way around a home improvement store yet. We figured that it was a small area and we'd simply scrape off the ridges in no time. Wrong! We spent several nights chipping away at these stubborn ridges with a hammer, pry bar and small 3" metal scraper. A week after finishing scraping all the thinset off the floor we saw the actual floor scraping tools at the store which would have made our lives easier for those few days. Not only did we find the actual tools for the job but we also saw that you could rent the various specialized tools at the store! Oh well, the job was at least finished. Next David put out some self leveling concrete to even out the two concrete slabs that run through our unit.Finally, some tile on the floor!

The dining "room". ;) That pink carpet keeps rearing it's ugly head into all my progress pictures.the kitchen. please don't judge the mess. We are living in a full on construction zone as you can tell by the choice foods on display.Finally inserting all the cut edge and corner pieces. We are almost finished! The past two days we have spent grouting the floor and I am amazed at how much work we have done ourselves. Our house looks much better with some updated flooring. Now we just need to get rid of the rest of the pink carpet.

I just got done reading Anita's post about this gloomy June weather and I could not agree more! A couple of weeks ago we were driving to Dave's parents house via the Golden Gate Bridge. I could not believe how foggy it was for being in the month of June! Hey California, Where's the sun?

You guys are awesomely ambitious! It will look much better than what you've got. Ahhh, that rose-colored carpet. So reminiscent of the '80s and early '90s. If you ever visit the Portland Temple, you'll see loads of it (unless they've redone it).